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David Warren does the Solzhenitsyn honors today.
Prophetic writers are a holy nuisance to everyone, but especially to themselves. The gift of prophecy renders a man incapable of a quiet life, incapable of enjoying idle pleasures, incapable of looking the other way — when it is to no immediate personal advantage to be staring at the truth. But it cannot take away the normal human desire for such comforts.
Nobody could have wished to be Alexander Solzhenitsyn, poet of the Gulag, and of its “zeks” (hapless prisoners). Providence compelled him to experience at first hand everything he would immortalize, from the prison camps to the terminal wards to betrayals of every imaginable kind. And to these it added something more cruel: moments in which victories were achieved against improbable odds, each overturned in the next moment.
Yet providence also instilled the strength to resist illusion, and few men have endured what Solzhenitsyn repeatedly endured, more stoically. From the moment of his first arrest in 1945, he ceased to entertain the illusion that communism could reform itself; and later the illusion that after the final collapse of communism, the Russian people would emerge in any other condition than they did: scarred and debilitated by their experience of enslavement, and by their complicity in the machinations of evil. …
Paul Greenberg too.
Our final essay on Reagan by Mark Steyn is from the Daily Telegraph, UK.
‘We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.” Of all the marvelous Ronald Reagan lines retailed over the weekend, that’s my favourite. He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and it encapsulates his legacy at home and abroad.
I like it because too often we “small government” conservatives can sound small ourselves – pinched and crabbed and reductive. Reagan made small government a big idea. I always think of him in those broad-shouldered suits, arms outstretched, an inch of cuff: he was awfully expansive about shrinking government.
In the speech, he meant it domestically: it was an age when every government cure for inflation only doubled it. He slew that double-digit dragon so comprehensively that today the word “inflation” is all but obsolescent, at least as a political issue.
But, in the broader sense, Reagan’s line about nations that have governments is a good way to weigh up the world. Across central and eastern Europe, from Slovenia to Lithuania to Bulgaria, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments – serving at the people’s pleasure.
The intelligentsia persist in believing this had nothing to do with Reagan or Thatcher: they maintain that the Soviet empire would have collapsed anyway, their belated belief in the inevitable failure of communism being in no way inconsistent with their previous long-held belief in the inevitable triumph of communism. And anyway, they continue, if anyone was responsible, it was Mikhail Gorbachev. …
In his weekly campaign piece for WSJ, Karl Rove outlines McCain’s path to a win.
Notwithstanding the hype about Barack Obama, here is where the presidential race stands: John McCain was within an average of 1.9% of his Democratic opponent in last week’s daily Gallup tracking poll.
It shouldn’t be this close. Sen. Obama should be way ahead. It’s not that Sen. McCain has made up a lot of ground. Pollster.com1 shows that the Republican steadily declined from March through June as the Democratic contest dominated the news. Mr. McCain stabilized in July, and then ticked up slightly. But the most important political fact of July is that Mr. Obama has lost altitude. Gallup now projects that 23% of this year’s electorate will be swing voters, more than twice the share in 2004.
It seems that each candidate is underperforming with his base. Mr. Obama’s problem is that only 74% of Democrats in the latest Fox Poll support him, while Mr. McCain gets 86% of Republicans. But Mr. McCain’s support lacks the same intensity Mr. Obama receives. The latest Pew poll found that 24% of voters “strongly” support Mr. Obama, compared to 17% for Mr. McCain. …
Tony Blankley writes about this year’s anointed one.
It’s getting tricky to know how to refer to he who presumes to be the next president. It was made clear several months ago that mentioning his middle name is a forbidden act. (Pass out more eggshells.) Then, having nothing honorable to say, Obama warned his followers last week that Sen. McCain would try to scare voters by pointing to Obama’s “funny name” and the fact that “he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills.”
Now, putting aside for the moment the racial component of His warning, what are we to make of the “funny name” reference? Many people have “funny” names. Some people think my last name — being very close in spelling to the adverbial form for the absence of content — is funny.
Certainly, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s name is funny. Many on the left have had great fun with President Bush’s last name. But we all have found our names perfectly serviceable and would expect people to call us by the names by which we identify ourselves.
But He has made it clear that the mere use of His name would be freighted with coded innuendoes of something too horrible to say straightforwardly. One has to go back to Exodus 3:13-14 to find such strict instructions concerning the use of a name. Moses explained: “Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” …
Karen Tumulty asks a rhetorical, “Have the Clintons Gotten Over It” and answers, “No.”
… Meanwhile, if Hillary Clinton’s feelings are still bruised, her husband’s are positively raw. The former President is particularly resentful of suggestions—which he believes were fueled by the Obama camp—that he attempted to play upon racial fears during the primaries. Not helping is the fact that Obama has yet to follow up on the tentative dinner plans he and Bill Clinton made at the end of the primary season. “It’s personal with him, in terms of his own legacy,” says a friend of Bill Clinton’s. “And the race stuff really left a bad taste in his mouth.”
Bill Clinton’s resentment came through in an interview with ABC News during his recent trip to Africa. Asked what regrets he might have about his role in his wife’s campaign, he bristled and then shot back, “I am not a racist. I never made a racist comment.” He struggled to render a positive comment about Obama’s qualifications for his old job. “You could argue that nobody is ever ready to be President,” Clinton said. “You could argue that even if you’ve been Vice President for eight years, that no one can ever be fully ready for the pressures of the office.” Pressed again, he responded with an endorsement that could hardly have been a weaker cup of tea: “I never said he wasn’t qualified. The Constitution sets qualification for the President. And then the people decide who they think would be the better President. I think we have two choices. I think he should win, and I think he will win.” …
Politico writes on Jon Voight coming out of the closet. The Hollywood closet occupied by those who love freedom and think we are best served by market solutions.
Jon Voight intended to turn heads with the “very strong points” in his Washington Times op-ed last week. But he probably didn’t expect so many of them to reside in Hollywood.
In a sign of the growing interest in politics this election year, bloggers who normally focus on the entertainment industry are expanding their presence in one of the Internet’s other spheres of influence.
Voight’s piece slammed Democratic candidate Barack Obama, praised GOP contender John McCain and even repudiated his own Vietnam War protests as the naive flailings of a deluded youth. It was a stunning bit of self-revelatory memoir from the now-conservative “Coming Home” star.
The political blogsosphere, of course, went ballistic. …
Roger Simon has rough words for Random House.
Although it has for some time been a division of German media giant Bertelsmann, Random House has been one of the distinguished names in American publishing since the halcyon days of Bennett Cerf. So it is particularly repugnant to see the company knuckling under to essentially the same reactionary, anti-democratic, anti-free speech forces that repressed the Danish cartoons. As we learned in the Wall Street Journal today, the company has decided not to publish Sherry Jones’ historical novel “The Jewel of Medina” about Mohammed’s child bride Aisha. The book was part of a $100,000 two-book contract with the author. …
Walter Williams says we’re becoming a nation of thieves.
… Much of the justification for the welfare state is to reduce income inequality by making income transfers to the poor. Browning provides some statistics that might help us to evaluate the sincerity and truthfulness of this claim. In 2005, total federal, state and local government expenditures on 85 welfare programs were $620 billion. That’s larger than national defense ($495 billion) or public education ($472 billion). The 2005 official poverty count was 37 million persons. That means welfare expenditures per poor person were $16,750, or $67,000 for a poor family of four.
Those figures understate poverty expenditures because poor people are recipients of non-welfare programs such as Social Security, Medicare, private charity and uncompensated medical care. The question that naturally arises is if we’re spending enough to lift everyone out of poverty, why is there still poverty? The obvious answer is poor people are not receiving all the money being spent in their name. Non-poor people are getting the bulk of it. …
We close today with a couple of items that prove God has a sense of humor. Bill Clinton, in his AIDS fighting role, has come out for monogamy. And Al Gore has a new 100 foot boat named Bio Solar One. That’s right, BS One.